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crispinalt writes "Just in time for the holiday season, Brian Whitman, the creator of Eigenradio, has had his computers compose the 'statistically optimal' Christmas music in A Singular Christmas, a freely downloadable MP3 album. A bank of computers listened to as much Christmas music as they could handle, and then learned their own true meaning of holiday cheer. Enjoy!"

Never did the chestnuts, but then I grew up without a fireplace (and snow, for that matter... or the temperatures that would make a fireplace more than silly vanity). But then, I've never seen a "white Christmas" either, and that's common to plenty of kids today. Saw frost for the first time about a week ago.

But the sleigh rides I did on many many occasions with various groups, singing carols and having a great time. Of course, they were wheeled, but the horse was there, the hot chocolate, and the great

Hmm, I don't know if any of you will be able to actually listen to this "music" but it certainly isn't worth wasting your time and bandwith to try. Expecting something more like "music" I downloaded it at work and at home before the story posted to the front page for everyone...

To my surprise it is quite "infantile". What I mean when I say "infantile" is that it sounds like a 9 month old baby banging on the keys randomly until you want to duct tape their hands together (see 02 - Mountain noel for an example of this).

03 - Faithful clear is certainly "clear" as it is basically the same tone for 2:31. Really holidayish, thanks! Expecting 13 - Cherry misfortune to perhaps be exactly the opposite I listened intently three times hoping to catch a glimpse of the artistry that would cause this story to be posted to Slashdot. I didn't find it.

Needless to say it won't exactly be a Merry Christmas for Brian Whitman and his computers and I doubt they will be making any money anytime soon if they continue to put out work of this "caliber"...

Brian, perhaps "17 - Silent night" should just be a blank MP3 that goes on for 2:34. I think that one would be the most popular.

"Pum Pa Chestnut Pies" is a bit creepy, but it's almost recognizable as music.

It sounded to me like an orchestra tuning up. I kept waiting for a conductors baton to tap on a music stand.

On a less subjective note - it seemed like one of the main things missing from this "music" is a repeated pattern, or chorus if you will. What I think this eigenradio should do is identify repeating patterns in the music it listens to. Then it could generate statistical "choruses" that it could play in optimal repeated

Yeah I think you got it - these algorithms do not recognize what humans find attractive about music - such things as rhythm, and having mostly major-scale harmony and very little dissonance, especially in "happy music" like Christmas music.

And saying that it is statistically optimal feels Orwellian.

But I suspect the researchers don't actually like this stuff either, they're just curious to observe people's reactions.

Except that John Cage's version is 4:33 [wikipedia.org]. And Silent Night [wikipedia.org] was first performed in it's current form in 1818, so John Cage is the one in trouble. That is, if he weren't already dead.

I find Eigenradio and likewise this Christmas project as something of an overworked joke. The resulting buzzing noise isn't really listen-able or interesting or telling.

You could take all the stuff in your refrigerator--a composite, if you will of all your favorite foods, toss them in a blender and you'd have an unappealing brown slop. Ha ha. Kind of funny conceptually, but you wouldn't necessarily open a restaurant serving it.

I've heard snippits of TSO. I can't fault people for liking it but it leaves me with the same kinda dread I feel when I hear the likes of Mannheim Steamroller and the likes of the Windham Hill crew going at the Christmas theme.

Again, I'm not saying it's bad, it's certainly talented but I just can't get into it.

Yah, and the part that sucks is when -- like fruit cake -- you get bits stuck in your teeth, and you can't get the pieces out!

Seriously. At my ultra corporate contract gig, someone had decorated his cube with a quite elaborate setup, including the music -- his laptop kicks out the SAME FOUR SONGS ALL DAY LONG, while he goes off to cookie meetings and such. It's DRIVING ME INSANE!

And then I sing Frank Sinatra's Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to myself on the way to my car...

It was strange watching A Charlie Brown Christmas last night, which is in large part a polemic against the commercialization of Christmas... from 1965.

It was immediately followed by an ad for Kohl's Christmas sale, Mervyn's (I think) Christmas sale, and a Christmas sale at a local car dealership. (Along with a couple of other commercials that weren't Christmas.)

I'm not sure I'd really want to advertise my Christmas specials during or immediately following the airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I'm not sure I'd really want to advertise my Christmas specials during or immediately following the airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

No, but it proves that most people probably just watch the pretty cartoons, and have no concept of the meaning of what they've just watched. Because you KNOW that most of them watch the show, then said, "Oooh, Mervyn's is having a sale!".

"However, the special has not been seen in its original, uncut form since its original telecast in 1965. The opening and closing credits contain references to Coca-Cola, the show's original sponsor (the main titles have Linus and Snoopy crashing into a Coca-Cola sign, while the final end credit mentions "Merry Christmas from your local Coca-Cola bottler"). Years later, the FCC imposed sanctions preventing sponsor references in the context of a story (especially children's programming), which is why these elements (as well as several seconds of other footage) have not been seen lately on television, even on home video."

I've never heard that before, so I'm not guaranteeing that someone hasn't imparted their own imagined occurence to Wikipedia.

Clicking through the link to a server there to stay,Eating all the bandwidth up, and laughing all the way.There will be no more response to http requests,The slashdot crowd has once again done the server bandwidth test!

Slashdot hits, slashdot hits, slashdot all around,Oh what fun is it to melt a server to the ground!Slashdot hits, slashdot hits, slashdot all around,Oh what fun is it to melt a server to the ground!

---

I'm dreaming of a big bandwidth,That can resist the slashdot crowd.May your days be merry and bright,And may all your servers survive tonight.

---

Oh the slashdot effect is frightful,But the story is so delightful,And since we have the link to go:Down it go, down it go, down it go!

It doesn't show signs of stoppingAnd I've bought some corn for poppingThe bandwidth is turned way down lowDown it go, down it go, down it go!

When we finally kiss goodnightTo the server out in the click-storm,The server will no more be allright,But at least it will really be warm.

The server is slowly dying,And my dear, it's access-denying,But as long, as we love clicking so,Down it go, down it go, down it go!

More Christmas music? No thanks. I was hanging out at the liquor store yesterday (hooray for holiday wine) and was talking to some of the store employees. Although I insisted they shut off that fscking music, they said in fact it's piped in from head office. This seems to be the case with many stores these days; Christmas music is just piped in. Apparently it has a positive effect on sales, as people have been trained to associate Christmas music with opening their wallets.

I was at Second Cup once and heard this really cool song, so I asked one of the employees "cool music, is this [perky female with guitar]?" He looked at me like I'd grown a second head, and informed me he had no way of knowing what was being played.

It's a real shame hat some people honestly think that MP3s are illegal now. They have heard so much about P2P networks and people getting sued that they assume that MP3s are illegal... I've legally purchased thousands of MP3s I tell them, but they still don't believe... sad really.

Not really. Eigenradio isn't something that's supposed to figure out what humans like or not. Eigenradio's about applying a linear algebra trick in a glut of signals and streaming out the resulting junk. It's a joke; either laugh at it or ignore it, but don't be offended.

Students at Miami left today; I have about 140 megabits to lay waste to if someone would like to give it to me (scp or something) you can IM me at ToadMan8. I kinda want to see if I can/. the University.

Oh, how long can trusty Cadet Enigmals1 hold out?How can he possibly resist the diabolical urge to push the button that could erase his very existence?
Will his tortured mind give in to it's uncontrollable desires?
Can he withstand the temptation to push the button, that even now, beckons him ever closer?
Will he succumb to the maddening urge to eradicate history, at the mere push of a single button?
The beautiful shiny button.
The jolly candy-like button.
Will he hold out, folks?
Can he hold out?With Apol

theres been a recent study at some uc college (forgot which) showing that tonal music promotes the growth of plants (atleast the species tested) and atonal music actually shows signs of inhibiting said growth.

to do a mathematical analysis of tonal and atonal music, there isn't a significant difference (atleast with good atonal music, which is hard to come by) suggesting the difference lies within our biology.

the reason this music seems so repulsive is likely the fact that the computer only studied the mus

Actually, its fantastically difficult (if not impossible) to write good or interesting music without using dissonant chords! Dissonances are necessary to make a harmonic progression interesting, whether they are dissonances between harmonies, or within them.

Um, let's see, what else? Ah, the tritone (augmented 4th/diminished 5th) was the Devil's tone, and it was in fact essentially verboten for some time, but has certainly been in wide use both in and out of the church for the last 300 years at least. Oh, and Mozart wrote a string quartet which was dubbed "Dissonances" that very successfully makes dissonant harmonies a fundamental part of it's materials.

I'm a pretty competent musician, a composer no less, and I couldn't imagine keeping a musical line interesting without the use of dissonance at some level--it really is not feasible. Its like trying to discern depth without light and shadows... contrastless mush.

I saw an episode of MythBusters where they play different types of music to plants and test how it affected their growth, Heavy Metal beat classical music in increasing the yield in Pea plants.
This brings about the question whether heavy metal is more atonnal than classical music.
Food for thought....

My hypothesis is that the computers account for the similarities in any carol by eliminating common chords. The remainder must be the stuff that differentiates a good song from a bad one. I believe this is a bad way to go about deciding what good music is, exactly because we want to hear those chords that are similar, but we also want to hear movement in music, which requires dissonance.

Think of a search engine: if you're indexing 1000 pages that all have the word "purple" in them, then your engine is prob

Reminds me of the Most Wanted Song / Most Unwanted Song [diacenter.org] project that Komar & Melamid did in conjunction with Dave Soldier. Based on survey responses, they created songs that (statistically speaking, of course) should appeal to 72 +/- 12% of listeners (most popular), and one that would appeal to fewer than 200 people in the entire world (least popular).

And no, they really didn't take it that seriously , they knew that their sampling and control methods weren't all that strict, and were aware that the resulting music isn't likely to actually generate responses that meet the projected stats.:)

Komar and Melamid also did a "most wanted painting [diacenter.org]" project, which has the actual survey results and resulting paintings available online.

of my life that I'll never get back. How is it that this not-quite-random noise is considered worthy of note on/.? If it were of decent artisitc quality, I could see why it might make news, but I could churn out garbage like this on my Apple IIe in elementary school.

From the title I was expecting an app that pulls down christmas music from usenet and automatically adds new tracks to a playlist as they come in. By the time the first track finishes playing, you'll already have a good dozen or two queued up.

I just don't find this kind of work very compelling. It's essentially just loosely structured data mapping, and when the results are unlistenable like this, what's the point?

Maybe this guy is just having some fun, but these projects need more depth to be successful. It's not very interesting as a conceptual piece or an aesthetic piece. The art is sorta drowning in math and code here.

Instead, check out David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence [ucsc.edu]. You can download mp3s [ucsc.edu] of some great pieces modeled after great composers. And the computer science behind it is also cool: Cope's approach involved developing a grammar for music, such that the generated pieces followed this grammar. Much easier on the ears:)

If I remember correctly, Cope's methods were vaguely similar to Mister Whitman's in the very broadest sense, in that EMI created a large probabilitive database to analyze the connections between melodic and harmonic events. Obviously, this database would be 'calibrated' to the style of the music given as input. I never studied EMI, so I don't know how deep the simulation of pseudogrammar went, but it certainly produced some interesting results. One year in orchestra we actually performed a faux-Mozart ov